The former chairman of Indian outsourcing firm Satyam Computer Services has been jailed for seven years for his part in a $1.4bn (£953m) accountancy fraud scandal.
The Special Central Bureau of Investigations Court in Hyderabad sentenced B. Ramalinga Raju and eight others - including auditors Subramani Gopalakrishnan and Talluri …

The founder of former Indian outsourcing biz Satyam Computer Services has been jailed for six months for cooking the company's books to the tune of $1.4bn.
The case has been rumbling on since Ramalinga Raju intially admitted the fraud in 2009 – a scandal that has been described as "India's biggest corporate fraud case", …

Indian outsourcer Tech Mahindra, which bought disgraced rival Satyam in 2012, has issued a profit warning — the first sign of trouble in the buoyant market for some time.
In a regulatory filing to the Bombay Stock Exchange, it blamed a "seasonally weak" mobility business for dragging down first-quarter revenue, with shares …

India’s IT outsourcing giant Mahindra Satyam has resurrected former high profile Telstra and Optus executive Ted Pretty, placing him in the chairman’s role for its newly fleshed out Australia and New Zealand operations.
Signalling a new push in A/NZ, Pretty has been tasked to drive Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra strategy …

The wonderful world of outsourcing is about to get a little bit smaller after Indian tech giants Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam announced their intention to merge, creating India’s fifth-largest IT and outsourcing group by revenues.
In reality it is Tech Mahindra in the driving seat, as the outsourcing giant bought a …

Indian reseller and outsourcer Mahindra Satyam and its auditor PwC have paid a total of $16m to end a US investigation into fraud charges.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said yesterday that failings by five PwC Indian subsidiaries allowed the massive fraud to go undetected for years. It said the problems were not limited …

Ramalinga Raju, disgraced boss of Satyam, has had his bail cancelled by the Indian Supreme Court ahead of hearings on charges of massive accounting fraud at the reseller.
Raju, his brother and and four other ex-Satyam staff implicated in the scandal, must return to prison by 8 November.
The court found that because most of the …

Indian outsourcer Satyam is to rebrand itself in order to draw a line under the revenue-boosting shenanigans of its ex-chief executive and founder, who is still awaiting trial.
Ramalinga Raju admitted falsely inflating Satyam revenues by about $1bn. He is still awaiting trial along with two auditors from PwC accused of signing …

Satyam's government-appointed board of directors met today to look at bids received for the company - the deadline for registering interest was last night.
Directors have appointed former Chief Justice of India SP Bharucha to oversee the process. Interested bidders have until next Friday to provide proof of funds totalling at …

The Central Bureau of Investigation - India's federal investigators - have arrested three of Satyam's financial staff they believe were involved in the fraud.
The beancounters are suspected of helping Satyam's founder Ramalinga Ramu forge documents to provide evidence of inflated revenues to auditors. Ramu wrote a bizarre letter …

Australian telco Telstra is pulling the plug on a A$32m contract with Satyam and handing the work to EDS.
The telco's annual applications support contract will not be renewed, despite a visit from Satyam's chief executive A S Murty last week.
Telstra refused to confirm the move, revealed by the Australian, because it does not …

Indian outsourcer Satyam has won government approval to save itself from bankruptcy by selling itself off.
In December Satyam all but imploded - the World Bank banned it from future bids because of bribery allegations, and then company chairman B Raju Ramalinga admitted falsifying accounts for several years by adding $1bn to …

Tech Mahindra, the successful buyer of Satyam, has asked European and US competition authorities to approve the takeover.
Sources told the Wall Street Journal that Tech Mahindra filed for regulator approval in Europe on Monday and would do the same for US regulators on Tuesday.
Four Tech Mahindra executives, including MD Vineet …

The race to buy Satyam is heating up and the board could make a decision as early as this Monday.
There are believed to be four bidders left in the race to buy the troubled outsourcer. These include building firm Larsen & Toubro, Tech Mahindra, Cognizant Technology and private equity investor Wilbur Ross.
The four will be …

Satyam today issued its first results since becoming engulfed in an accounting scandal early last year that almost broke the Indian services firm.
The scandal erupted when B Ramalinga Raju resigned in January 2009, after writing an extraordinary letter to directors admitting inflating profits at the firm by almost a billion …

The World Bank has barred India's Satyam Computer Services – the aid institution's largest software vendor and India's fourth-largest outsourcing company – from doing business with it for eight years.
On Tuesday, World Bank confirmed earlier reports of the ban in a statement that said Satyam had provided "improper benefits" to …

Satyam hopes the sale of its majority stake will be completed before the Indian general election which starts in mid-April.
The company has a shortlist of bidders for its business but they are likely to have to bid blind for the firm - they will be given access to Satyam's books, or rather a "data room", but the full restatement …

The shortlist of possible bidders for Satyam is likely to be finalised this week, after the companies made their final "expressions of interest".
There is no official statement from the company, but the board is believed to have met over the weekend for final discussions. Successfully shortlisted firms will then get full access …

The Satyam Computer Services scandal has flared back into life with allegations that the fraud perpetuated at the firm was 40 per cent bigger than previously thought.
India's Central Bureau of Investigation released a supplementary charge sheet today which claims that the ten people it says were behind the scam inflated revenues …

Troubled outsourcer Satyam has chosen two new auditors to help management find out just how bad its financial situation is after founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju admitted he had overstated profits and cash by $1bn.
KPMG and Deloitte were named in several reports as the new auditors, although a spokeswoman for Deloitte …

Indian outsourcer Satyam has appointed two investment banks to help it find long term funding.
Avendus and Goldman Sachs are talking to banks and are dealing with immediate operating expenses. Satyam has also lined up cash for January salaries from money received.
Board member T N Manoharan said Satyam had received proposals …

The Indian government has ruled out any bailout of struggling outsourcer Satyam.
Ashwani Kumar, minister of state for industry, told The Times of India: "This government is not going to directly or indirectly subsidize wrong-doing and fraud in Satyam."
He said the government would do what it could to save jobs at Satyam, and …

Troubled Indian outsourcer Satyam is asking for formal bids from potential buyers before the final details of its fraud investigation are known.
The company, which is the country’s fourth largest outsourcing outfit, wants to invite bids for a potential sale of its business as soon as regulatory approvals are completed.
“While …

Satyam's board of directors took two days to decide, but has now appointed a new CEO to replace Ramalinga Raju, who is still in jail awaiting trial for an alleged billion-dollar fraud.
A S Murty, a 15-year Satyam veteran, starts as CEO immediately. He is informally known as ASM and previously worked at Tata.
Board member Deepak …

Regulators from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) have won the right to question the Raju brothers and other Satyam staff.
Ramalinga Raju and his brother Rama and the firm's CFO are all still in custody. Ramalinga wrote an explosive letter admitting a $1bn fraud, although he insisted he did not benefit personally …

Indian police have begun an investigation into Satyam following the resignation of its chairman and founder B Ramalinga Raju and his apparent confession to accounting fraud.
Raju stepped down on Wednesday, sending the board an extraordinary resignation letter admitting to years of puffing the figures at the services giant he …

IT services giant Satyam has abandoned the takeover of two Indian building groups after investors reacted with horror to the proposal.
Satyam shares fell over 30 per cent on the Indian stock exchange and more than 50 per cent in New York after it said it would pay $1.6bn for 100 per cent of Maytas Properties, which develops new …

Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju added 13,000 invented employees to the firm's payroll so he could siphon off their wages, Indian prosecutors have claimed.
Raju allegedly funnelled the money off through family members and used it to fund more than 400 land deals.
Satyam claimed to have 53,000 employees, but in reality this was …

Ramalinga Raju, his brother, Rama, and Satyam's chief financial officer Vadlamani Srinivas are all in prison this morning after being arrested and charged with conspiracy and forgery offences connected to the $1bn fraud at the Indian outsourcer.
The three men will stay in custody until a trial, scheduled to start 23 January. …

Tech Mahindra looks set to seize control of Satyam - the almost terminally troubled Indian outsourcer.
Tech Mahindra has paid $351m for a 31 per cent stake in the firm - on top of the 31 per cent it already owned. This gives a rough value for Satyam of $1bn, a good premium on its current share even if it is only a fraction of …

The Indian government suspects Satyam's disgraced former chairman Ramalinga Raju may have diverted money into a maze of subsidiary firms.
Minister of State for Company Affairs Prem Chand Gupta told the FT that there had clearly been serious irregularities in the firm's figures: "On the face of it the Registrar of Companies feels …

Indian police have accused two PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants of colluding and conspiring with company founder Ramalinga Raju to create false accounts for Satyam.
The two auditors are in police custody but have not yet been charged.
"During interrogation [the auditors, Subramani Gopala Krishnan and Talluri Srinivas] …

Police raided PricewaterhouseCooper's offices in Hyderabad today in connection with the ongoing investigation into the alleged billion dollar fraud at outsourcer Satyam.
PWC audited Satyam's accounts and was apparently unaware of the large holes they contained.
The firm's chairman admitted last week to cooking the books over …

Satyam's board of directors is expected to announce a new CEO and CFO this week, and is also close to finding short-term funding.
Last week they said the list had been narrowed down to three names. The group also expects to have funding in place by Wednesday. The board meets tomorow for final discussions but said the firm's …

Satyam's founder and chairman B Ramalinga Raju has disappeared, a day after he admitted to years of false accounting at the outsourcing giant.
Raju's lawyer insisted his client remained in Hyderabad despite conflicting reports that he had fled to Dubai or Texas. He has not been seen in public since yesterday's extraordinary …

Satyam hopes to kick its way into Europeans' affections through a services deal it struck with Fifa last year.
The India-based services provider signed up as Official IT Services Provider to the 2010 and 2014 FIFA World Cups last November, ensuring its name will be plastered all over the tournaments alongside mega brands such …

Diablo Technologies, the supplier of flash latency-lowering Memory Channel Storage IP to SanDisk/SMART, has been awarded a patent, U.S. patent No. 8,713,379, entitled a “System and method of interfacing co-processors and input/output devices via a main memory system”, which t describes as a "key technology".
The new patent …

Satyam has promised to settle arguments over what radio station to listen to in the car when it launches its dot auto platform next year.
The IT services company is using its background providing outsourced services for auto makers to develop its own software and hardware platforms which it will sell to auto suppliers and …

The founder and chairman of Indian outsourcer Satyam Mr B Ramalinga Raju has resigned and admitted fiddling the company's accounts for years in order to inflate profits.
The company has had a torrid few weeks - the board admitted the company founders had hocked their shares to guarantee loans and that those shares may have been …

Australia’s telecommunications, mining and financial services markets have proven to be a key lure for India’s Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra to significantly ramp up their local operations.
In March, Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra announced the finalisation of the merger between the two companies. 12% of global revenue …

Quantum's recently resigned sales supremo Ted Stinson has joined virtualisation startup PernixData to head up its sales operation.
Stinson, who left disk/tape data protection and file management supplier Quantum earlier this month, is excited about PernixData's "A-plus investors, exceptional founding team and very strong beta …

Early-stage US start-up PernixData has decided it needs a European evangelist and persuaded VMware's Frank Denneman to jump ship.
Denneman is, or rather was, a senior architect in technical marketing at VMware, based in the Amsterdam area. He has co-authored three VMware-focussed technical books, and is widely acclaimed as a …

Sysadmin blog
Ready to hear about the next IT startup niche? It's an emerging market called "host-based caching", and you might wish to pay attention if you'd like to understand how a few people got stupidly rich a few years from now.
The Cliff's notes version of host-based caching is that it turns flash drives inside your virtual hosts into …

PernixData is a startup in stealth mode developing a data platform for the software-defined data centre (SDDC).
Stealth mode means the company has talked to angel or seed investors about its basic proposition and the money people like it well enough to pump in initial startup cash. A founding company organisation is then set up …

Brouhaha
Satyam Vaghani, the co-founder and chief technology officer of PernixData took exception to El Reg's characterisation of the startup's FVP software, which virtualises flash storage attached to virtualised servers and creates a single pool of block-addressable flash capacity across those servers.
From the small amount of …

A company's IT Infrastructure is crucial to its survival and success, which is why most companies invest heavily in that area to reduce risk and increase performance.
Despite these investments, the complex and dynamic nature of IT infrastructure environments means that most companies do not have a complete picture of their IT …

The five-day mainframe bank system meltdown at the National Bank of Australia (NAB) was due to a corrupted file on an IBM mainframe system that was being upgraded.
It's reported that staff attempted a mainframe upgrade on Wednesday 25 November, and this failed to complete. It was reversed and this was when, it appears, ongoing …

Indian outsourcer Satyam has confirmed the departure of two directors and an early board meeting to discuss its future after a disastrous few weeks.
Satyam, India's fourth largest outsourcer, said Professor Krishna G Palepu, a non-executive director and Mr. Vinod K Dham, a non-executive and independent director, have both left …

IT consultancy Satyam is to take responsibility for testing of KPN's fixed, mobile, and internet divisions for the next three years.
Telco KPN operates in the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. Satyam will become a key partner in creating systems and processes for testing and QA - largely through its offshore development centre …

The World Bank has revealed the full list of companies banned for bidding for future contracts because of alleged malpractice.
Troubles at Satyam took a turn for the worse when it was revealed on Christmas Eve that it was banned from applying for World Bank contracts for eight years.
Now it has emerged that Wipro, India's third …